Well, the high-brow film festival that is Cannes kicked off today and it's already steeped in drama. At an anti-piracy seminar held yesterday, alarming reports about the evils of piracy in Europe were slammed onto the table, among them the shocking estimations that 700,000 illegal copies of the German hit movie Good Bye, Lenin were in circulation before the film's release on DVD. But not everyone present was left wringing their hands, Quentin Tarantino, Jury president and member of the piracy forum panel, caused more than a little consternation when he announced: "I would be a liar if I was to say, across the board, no piracy."

Don't get carried away though, the Kill Bill director is neither endorsing the practice nor suggesting that you start hawking copies of the latest titles from the boot of your granny's Nissan Micra, rather he believes piracy does allow people to watch films they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. For this reason he's not complaining that bootleg versions of his Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction were distributed in China - a country where his film was never granted a release. QT stated that he's grateful certain rare movies that are not for sale in stores can still be acquired via under-the-counter means.

However, as the panel went on to point out, movie piracy continues to be a blight on the industry with The Motion Picture Association estimating a loss of $3.5 billion a year as a direct result. And that's not even taking into account illegal downloads off the Internet. Yikes!